ABSTRACT
As you well know, efforts toward bringing substantive changes to the institutional patterns and practices of public schooling can very quickly be frustrated by any number of seemingly intractable challenges. For example, when citizens here in North Carolina visit the website of the state’s Department of Public Instruction, they could walk away with the impression that our schools function as model teaching and learning environments, grounded in high-principled and thoroughly researched standards that guide the work of administrators, teachers, and students.1 If those same citizens, however, after reading about and understanding those standards, ventured into the schools and classrooms in this state, they would be hard pressed to fi nd any real presence of those high-minded standards in the professional cultures of those schools. Only rarely would they meet teachers whose curricular and instructional practices upheld those standards in any meaningful way. Yet sadly, the mere pronouncement of newer and higher standards satisfi es the concerns of most citizens and their governmental representatives for the quality of public schools. Any serious efforts toward implementing and enforcing those standards, meanwhile, goes neglected. Under these circumstances, school reform reforms nothing but the paper on the package. What’s inside the box never changes, and no one notices because no one looks. New standards come with new slogans, but the lack of any serious measures to enforce them reduces those standards to the status of political gimmicks.2
